Sight: 07/01/2001 - 08/01/2001

He answers all his mail. Ankit Fadia

Fighting the good fight

Scared of Hackers? Indian Teenager Offers Help

Another Amazon-inspired link:

Crime Novel anthologies made into film noir

Issued by the Library of America

Amazon.com had Heavier than Heaven, Charles Cross' extensively researched book on Kurt Cobain, on their main page, and that lead me to researching Olympia, Washington and the Seattle music scene of the '90s.

LOSER, The Real Seattle Music Story

Detailing the history of punk rock in Seattle from the '50s to the '90s. Amazon link.

Other Nirvana/Cobain books:

Come as you are - Michael Azerrad
Kurt Cobain - Christopher Sandford
Nevermind:Nirvana - Charles Cross

Some cool technology-related business numbers: Meeker Numbers. Buffet also made the comparison between the auto industry's beginning and the Internet industry's. I don't recall the reference doc, but in one meeting, he held up a list of names, rather long, of auto manufacturers who incorporated at the beginning of the last century. The list was pages long, and that was just the "A's." Now there are 3, and the profit margin is slim.

George Frost Kennan's Long Telegram (February 22, 1946): When tasked to describe the Soviet Union's uncompromising position on the World Bank, George Kennan responded with an 8,000 word telegram which lead to the theory of containment of communism that remained US policy until the collapse of communism in 1989.

Evidence of the increasing power of corporations in America: Russian programmer is arrested when he gives a speech in America about the program he wrote to convert eBooks into Adobe Acrobat format.
Empire: The world is no longer arranged around the concept of city-states - governments are being taken over by corporations in the global economy.
Emmanuel Todd: French sociologist writes about his ideas on the family, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
China Daily: A letter predicts the collapse of the US economy a month before the dot com bubble bursts.
Blood, Money, & Greed: Conspiracy theory book about how the wealthy control the world.

Arguements agains the auteur theory

Miles Copeland writes about how big record companies are not greedy in his guest column on the RIAA website. He mentions a few that have "been shuttered," A&M, Geffen, Chrysalis, IRS, etc.

But Geffen Records was sold to MCA, and the man behind the label went on to form Dreamworks SKG with Steven and Jeffrey.

I wouldn't consider a company that was successfully sold to another operating company a business failure, or indication that an industry's profit margins are shrinking.

There is a crisis going on, similar to when rock & roll first came out and was criticised for offensive and subjective lyrics. Today the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet met for 3 hours to discuss the entertainment industry's efforts to curb children's exposure to violent content. The movie and gaming industry were complemented for their advances in self-monitoring through ratings, but the music industry was lambasted for the failure of their ratings to be understandable to parents.

Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the RIAA argued against enhancing the rating system for songs, noting that while the movie industry rates the 600 movies a year released in the US, the recording industry would have to rate the more than 370,000 songs released in a year. Along with the considerable work this would take, the subjective judgements which would have to be made would send the industry into an uproar, Ms. Rosen argued.

Her official response is posted on the RIAA website, which states that the industry will publicize the existing rating systems with more posters and PSAs.

The crisis begins with the FCC fining of a radio station in Colorado for playing the relatively mild Eminem song, The Real Slim Shady. Apparently this song is deemed indecent by the FCC. No wonder I haven't heard it lately on the radio.

With Napster out of commission and radio stations self-censoring because of the threats of fines from an increasingly conservative FCC, where will hip hop fans go to for new and old favorite releases?

Grim Prospect
Argument for allowing DVDs to be decrypted on Linux.

I've been doing so much research these days that I'm researching references for e-mails before I send them. Here's some interesting facts (albeit alittle cynical, please bear with me). I'd like to read Naomi Klein's No Logo, even though the Picadorlogo on the front cover negates her argument against brand identity. Picador is an imprint created by Macmillan Publishers, LTD, one of the largest publishers in the world (Britannica reference). In my defence, I didn't catch this. A reporter on NPR brought it up to Klein when he interviewed her. Her response was that she needed to reach the broadest possible audience. I guess that's reason enough to sacrifice your message.

David Siegel just won't go away!

He just keeps creating new websites. Take his old journal for example. Last updated April 30th, 1998, Siegel's amour propre shows no bounds as he describes his youthful indescretions and thoughts of the day. However, given the mutable nature of the Internet, the page reads like a 19th century historical novel, with just as much relevance to today.

Other sites include Verso, Mr. Siegel's (former?) employer and The Nine-Act Structure, Mr. Siegel's foray into the architecture of screenwriting. The author of Creating Killer Sites should read his own book or at least update it. His site is not easy to navigate (there's no site map), and it is steeped in the non-database driven pseudo-designer's method of shoving a multitude of images and colors in your face with the mistaken belief that overstimulation makes for good web design. The companion website to Creating Killer Sites lists Adobe Photoshop 4.0.1 (version 6 has been out since August, 2000), and Illustrator 7.0 (version 9 has been out since June, 2000) as image creation software. The links point to files no longer on Adobe's website.

Siegel wrote another book, Futurize Your Enterprise: Business Strategy in the Age of the E-customer (1999) in which he posits his new career as web consultant to big business. His message to them is to make the customer central to your business, an idea that has been a part of TQM since the '50s, and has been pushed by management theory luminary Peter Drucker for decades. Mr. Siegel attributes this groundbreaking new trend to startups.

Websites do require a nice design, but more important is how often they are updated. Websites differ from books in that they can be constantly changed. The Internet looks like it is heading towards more database-driven pages displaying current information and products. The layout of Yahoo Finance! and Amazon.com are some examples. The question now is where is David Siegel? His Futurizebooks website, the companion website to Futurize Your Business invites viewers to "Join us at FuturizeWest, April 19-22!" But scrolling down it becomes apparent that this event was scheduled for last year.

David Siegel is leaving bread crumbs in his outdated websites that litter the net. If he is intent on delighting his customers, how does he expect them to find him?

Reference for the history of TQM: Attractive quality: its importance and the points of remark, YOSHIO KONDO, Total Quality Management, July 2000 pS647.
David Siegel's latest virtual manifestation is at Siegel Vision.